age, race, nationality, language, "attitude to religion," occupation, place of residence and work, or political views. • the need for permission from the Russian Press and Information Ministry to distribute foreign periodicals. • punishment for "abuse of freedom of mass media." The Russian press law also provides that international agreements have precedence over the statute's own text. This gives force of law to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose provisions allow restrictions to press freedom to protect national security, public order, public health or morals. The free field this so obviously offers to violate press freedom was a major reason that the United States ratified that 1966 treaty only in 1992. Even then, it entered a formal reservation stating that those restrictions to free speech violate the U.S. Constitution. Press freedom restrictions contained in such international documents were a price the West paid during the Cold War to get Soviet bloc signatures on anything at all calling for the respect of human rights. Applying still another provision of the new Russian press law, the government had applied to the courts to ban the 150,000-circulation nationalist daily Dyen after issuing it three required "official warnings," the last one for calling upon Boris Yeltsin to resign. TV broadcasts of parliamentary debates showed large numbers of deputies reading the paper at their desks. Former Russian Information Minister Mikhail Fedotov argued that banning Dyen should be acceptable to democrats because it would come only after a court order, not by administrative decision as formerly. Fedotov said that if he had nothing on the books but a constitutional press freedom guarantee, he would have no basis to go to court to "defend" the press. Another form of defence Fedotov invented was selective subsidisation, as opposed to even-handedly neutral, across-the-board forms of support, such as lower postal rates, relief from the 32% tax on profits and the 20% Value Added Tax, or subsidies for newsprint production. With this tool, Fedotov rewarded Yeltsin's friends and punished his enemies in the press. The system of creating a new press dependence on government handouts has been widely imitated throughout the former Soviet Union. Belarus Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich has said, "The government gives credits to the newspapers and magazines that take correct positions....I will support all the press, except publications opposed to the government." The way around this system was often for the press to seek subsidies from rival power centres, notably parliament. So, the bulk of the Russian press was polarised between support for the Yeltsin government and for the Supreme Soviet President, Ruslan Khasbulatov. As Pavel Goutiontov, chairman of the C.l.S. Journalists Union's Free Speech Committee, put it, "The conflict is over who will control the press - the presidency or the parliament. One of them will win. Whichever one it is, the journalists will lose." Those words turned out to be prescient. When Yeltsin's crackdown on parliament finally came, the government did not even bother to use the provisions of the law providing for the banning of papers via the courts. It just shut down fifteen papers, including Dyen, by decree and ordered two other to change their names, editorial lines, and editors-in-chief as conditions for continuing to publish. There was no basis in law for those orders. After the elections to replace the parliament that was dissolved in canon fire, President Yeltsin issued a series of decrees placing oversight of the media directly under the presidency rather than the cabinet, along with other measures asserting presidential responsibility for public broadcasting and state news agencies. The Russian presidency and parliament had been struggling over the constitution. The new Yeltsin constitution says in Article 29 that "Freedom of the mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be prohibited." But Article 54 says, "Human and civil rights and liberties may be restricted by federal law only as required to protect the constitutional system, morality, health, the rights and lawful interests of other persons, and the defence and security of the state." The unsuccessful rival Khasbulatov draft also established freedom of expression in its Article 25, but went on to say: "Limitations of these rights CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 13